Running SQL Server 2025 on Lenovo ThinkAgile HX V4 and FX V4 Servers with Intel Xeon 6 Processors

A Modern Relational Data Platform for Mission-Critical Workloads, Analytics, and AI

In today’s data-driven enterprises, organizations must manage rapidly growing volumes of structured and transactional data while ensuring consistency, performance, and security. Core business applications such as ERP, CRM, and financial systems continue to depend on relational databases for accurate and real-time operations. As data ecosystems evolve, enterprises are also integrating these systems with analytics and AI-driven insights. This creates a need for a platform that can handle both traditional workloads and modern data demands without compromising reliability or governance.

Microsoft SQL Server 2025 addresses these needs as a modern, enterprise-grade relational data platform designed for mission-critical workloads across on-premises and private cloud environments. With its proven adoption, robust transactional integrity, and advanced query processing capabilities, SQL Server delivers predictable performance at scale. Built-in high availability, security, and seamless integration with analytics and data services make it a foundational component for enterprise data strategies, enabling organizations to efficiently manage, analyze, and derive value from their data.

The Lenovo ThinkAgile HX650 V4 and FX650 V4 are 2-socket, 2U systems and The Lenovo ThinkAgile HX630 V4 and FX630 V4 are 2-socket, 1U systems. These hyperconverged systems feature the Intel Xeon 6 processors (formerly code named "Granite Rapids"). ThinkAgile HX V4 and FX V4 hyperconverged systems are designed for deploying industry-leading hyperconvergence software from Nutanix on Lenovo enterprise platforms.

Figure 1. ThinkAgile HX650 V4 (top) and HX630 V4 (bottom) designed for Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure

The Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP) delivers cloud‑scale advantages to enterprise applications and databases by combining ThinkAgile HX V4 and FX V4 and public cloud infrastructure. It provides robust enterprise storage, integrated data protection, built‑in resilience, unified management, advanced analytics, and end‑to‑end security and consistent performance for mission‑critical workloads.

ThinkAgile FX offers a unique, industry first flexibility for software-defined approach to hyper convergence, leveraging the ability to move between hypervisors of your choice to deliver compute, storage and management in a tightly integrated software stack and future-proof your investment with seamless HCI software transitions.

Figure 2. ThinkAgile FX650 V4 (top) and FX630 V4 (bottom) designed for flexible hyperconverged infrastructure

Combining performance and flexibility, the ThinkAgile HX V4 and FX V4 Hyperconverged systems deliver fully validated and integrated Lenovo hardware and firmware, certified and preloaded with licensed Nutanix software. The systems offer a broad selection of processors, memory and drives, and offers high performance features that industries such as finance, healthcare and telco need. Outstanding reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) and high-efficiency design can improve your business environment and can help save operational costs.

Lenovo ThinkAgile HX V4 and FX V4 Hyperconverged systems running Nutanix software provide a robust foundation for Microsoft SQL Server 2025 by combining compute, storage, and virtualization in a unified hyperconverged platform. This architecture supports higher consolidation, efficient scaling, and resilient infrastructure, while allowing SQL Server to take advantage of high core-count processors and large memory capacity for strong performance in transactional and analytical workloads.

Nutanix Database Service (NDB) enables businesses to register, provision, clone, and administer all SQL Server 2025 databases on one or more Nutanix clusters using deployment profiles. As database volumes expand, NDB enables online storage expansion without introducing downtime or requiring manually reconfigured volume mappings. It also seamlessly supports high-availability clusters and integrated protection domains

Microsoft SQL Server 2025 continues to serve as a relational database platform both on-premises and in private cloud infrastructures. It provides mechanisms for handling high-throughput transactional workloads, maintaining data integrity, and supporting integration with broader data ecosystems. With built-in capabilities for availability, security, and workload management, SQL Server is commonly adopted as a foundational component in enterprise infrastructure to support stable and scalable data operations.

SQL Server 2025 provides the following new features:

• Native Vector Data Type, Vector Functions, and Vector Search

  Supports native vector storage, vector functions, and approximate vector indexing/search to support semantic search, recommendations, and RAG-style AI applications directly inside the database engine.

• Built-in AI Model Integration from T-SQL

  Adds external AI model objects, embedding generation, chunking, and REST endpoint invocation, enabling T-SQL workloads to interact with Azure OpenAI, REST APIs, Azure Functions, GraphQL endpoints, and other services.

• Enhanced Intelligent Query Processing

  New IQP capabilities include cardinality estimation feedback for expressions, Optional Parameter Plan Optimization, DOP feedback enabled by default, Query Store for readable secondaries

• Optimized Locking for High-Concurrency OLTP

  Optimized locking reduces blocking, lock memory consumption, and lock escalation, improving concurrency for transaction-heavy applications.

• Native JSON Data Type and JSON Indexing

  Supports native JSON data type, JSON indexing, and additional JSON functions.

• Microsoft Fabric Mirroring and Hybrid Cloud Integration

  Supports mirroring to Microsoft Fabric, allowing on-premises SQL Server data to be continuously replicated into Fabric for analytics. Azure connected services also include Azure extension for SQL Server, Microsoft Entra integration, pay-as-you-go billing, and disaster recovery integration.

• Stronger Availability, Security, and Manageability

  SQL Server 2025 improves Always On availability groups, failover behavior, backup options, TLS 1.3 support with TDS 8.0, PBKDF password hashing, managed identity integration, and time-bound Extended Events sessions.

Our testing used HammerDB, an open-source database transactional and analytics load testing/benchmarking tool for databases. The OLTP workload is derived from the TPC-C Benchmark standard, and it is not comparable to published TPC-C and do not comply with the TPC-C benchmark standards. The testing described below used HammerDB instance running on a separate server.

The testing was performed using a four-node ThinkSystem HX650 V4 cluster with the following configuration parameters. SQL Server 2025 was deployed in a virtual machine running Windows Server 2025. The test was done on single node with four virtual machines.

For a high-performance SQL Server solution, implement the following best practices:

• Configure UEFI (Bios) settings to set Operating mode to Maximum performance.
• Configure power profile in Windows Server to ‘High performance’.
• SQL server database and log drives are recommended to be formatted with 64KB NTFS cluster size.
• SQL server database and log files should be on separate physical drives.
• The OS and SQL server binary drives are recommended to be formatted with standard 4KB NTFS cluster size.
• SQL Server consumes all memory allocated to virtual machines and it is recommended to set maximum memory consumed by SQL server instance by leaving sufficient memory of OS and system processes.
• TempDB is shared by many processes and users as a temporary working area and should be configured appropriately. Default configuration will be suitable for most workloads.
• If the server is dedicated to the SQL Server workload, use the default dynamic memory management model or follow Microsoft SQL documentation guidelines for manually configuring memory options if finer grain control is desired.

For more information, see these resources:

• ThinkAgile HX Solutions
  https://lenovopress.lenovo.com/datasheet/ds0019-lenovo-thinkagile-hx-solutions
• ThinkAgile FX Series
  https://lenovopress.lenovo.com/datasheet/ds0203-thinkagile-fx-series
• Lenovo ThinkAgile HX630 V4 Hyperconverged System
  https://lenovopress.lenovo.com/lp2132-lenovo-thinkagile-hx630-v4-hyperconverged-system
• Lenovo ThinkAgile HX650 V4 Hyperconverged System
  https://lenovopress.lenovo.com/lp2133-lenovo-thinkagile-hx650-v4-hyperconverged-system
• Lenovo ThinkAgile FX650 V4 Hyperconverged System
  https://lenovopress.lenovo.com/lp2338-lenovo-thinkagile-fx650-v4-hyperconverged-system
• Lenovo ThinkAgile FX630 V4 Hyperconverged System
  https://lenovopress.lenovo.com/lp2337-lenovo-thinkagile-fx630-v4-hyperconverged-system
• Reference Architecture for Workloads using Lenovo ThinkAgile HX and FX Series
  https://lenovopress.lenovo.com/lp0665-thinkagile-hx-and-fx-series-reference-architecture
• Microsoft SQL Server Documentation
  https://learn.microsoft.com/sr-latn-rs/sql/?view=sql-server-ver16

Chandrakandh Mouleeswaran is a Solution Architect with 18+ years of experience in software development, performance testing and engineering, having worked on designing and architecting many scalable enterprise applications. He has spent decade in technical enablement and partner solution development for VMware, Nutanix, Oracle and other ISVs across industries and technologies. He specializes in architecting infrastructure solutions for virtualization, VDI, database, cloud, data science, AI/ML solutions and various enterprise workloads.